Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 49: THE YARD

The days went. Three. Two. One. He worked the method at the dead lamp every morning. The lung did not finish. He walked the route every day. Every lamp clean. Marsh lost two more papers. The lane stayed empty at eleven.

The assessment came whether his body was ready or not.

The yard had a door and the door stayed shut until they opened it.

He had seen it once, four years ago, from the outside. He had carried Marsh’s papers up for the route transfer that day. A proctor told him to wait in the wrong corridor. He had seen the door then. Closed. Iron-banded. A man at it with a list.

He had filed it and not reached for it. A lamplighter did not go through that door.

Now he stood in the line that went through it with two beasts, a lung being taken apart, and a thirty-second window he had not had a month ago. The filing came off the shelf on its own.

It’s in there. It didn’t finish. It’s going to be doing it while I’m in the box.

His body was running on borrowed time and fraying focus.

Two beasts. A breath that doesn’t carry. A thirty seconds the body hasn’t reached for. That’s what I’m walking in with.

The line was forty admits and the admits had families at the rail. Voices filled the stone long before the first name was called.

A gate-clerk worked the line with a second list and stamped slips as the admits handed them up. Two admits ahead of Aiden were talking low at the rail’s edge.

"—heard one of the seven was off the list at fifth bell. Clerical thing. Got put back."

"Whose name."

"Vell."

Neither of them looked back at Aiden. He did not turn his head to read them. Another paper. This one had gone straight to the gate, past the desk Marsh had been catching them at. Someone here had struck it before it landed.

The gate was the one desk in the chain that did not owe him tea.

The gate clerk’s face gave him nothing, which was itself a reading. Clerks’ faces leaked.

Four years of standing at counters had built him a field guide. The eye-flick that meant a flag. The jaw-set that meant a fee. The particular blandness that meant the clerk had been told what to do with a name before the name arrived.

This was the blandness. Somebody had walked his name down to this gate ahead of him and left instructions. The clerk was performing a morning in which none of that had happened. Performing it well. Not quite well enough for an audience that read locks for a living.

My name came off the list this morning. Someone put it back. I don’t know who. Marsh’s desk didn’t catch this one. Someone else did.

That was the first thing the yard was that the route was not. The route was him and the dark and a clerk two streets over. This was stone tiered up on three sides. The tiers had people in them, more people than the depot held any day of the year.

The people were not there for him. They were there for sons. The sons stood in the line in good coats with beasts that had names a panel would know.

He stood in the same line in a lamplighter’s coat with a Venomspine that emptied rooms and a small dark thing the lamp would not land on. The rail looked at the line like any crowd at any line. Then it found him, as the depot clerk’s face had. It did what the clerk’s face had done: decided there might be something there, and waited to see.

That’s what it wanted. Marsh said it. Everyone in one place. The whole room it spent a week drawing. It’s in the tiers or it’s in the line or it’s the man at the door. I will not know which. It doesn’t behave wrong enough for anyone but me, and I haven’t got the air to read forty bodies.

Percival Vane was eleven men ahead.

He saw the Griffin first.

It stood at Percival’s shoulder like a creature bred to stand there. The crest on Percival’s coat was the crest the two men in the lane had said turned foragers off burned ground.

Percival did not look back down the line. He had not looked back down the line since the corridor with the proctor’s note that came apart. A man whose filed paper had been unmade did not look at what unmade it. He looked at the door.

The older proctor was at the door with the list.

He read names off the list and the line moved. He did not perform reading them, he just read them. When the line brought Aiden to him he looked up from the list at Aiden’s face. Then at the shoulder Miasma rode. Then at the shoulder Nyx rode. He did not write anything next to the name.

"Both," he said. Not a question. He had told Aiden to bring both, in the corridor, the day he said do not make me right the bad way.

"Both," Aiden said.

The proctor looked at him a beat longer than he had looked at the eleven ahead. He was reading the part that mattered, like Marsh read it.

Aiden stood in the door’s cold with the breath going short and let him read it. There was nothing to be done about what a man like that saw. Not performing was the only thing Aiden had ever had to give him.

"You’re breathing wrong," the proctor said. Low. Off the list. For Aiden and the cold and no one else.

"I know."

"Live Combat doesn’t move for a man breathing wrong. The panel won’t see it. They see beasts. I see the handler." He marked the list. One stroke.

"I’m not going to ask you if you can stand in there. You’ll say yes. Men in this line always say yes." He looked at Nyx. The same expression from the corridor crossed his face, the not-enjoying-being-right one. "I told you not to make me right the bad way. You brought it anyway. So either I was wrong about it, or you’ve got a reason worth the yard."

He stepped back off the door. "Walk through. Find out which."

The air felt heavier already.

The door opened.

It opened slow. No sound it chose to make. Light on the other side, flat, even, the yard’s light.

It fell on squared stone laid out wide. A burned line in the perimeter. A panel of four at a table on the far side under the highest tier. Walled. Open above.

The stone held the morning cold up through his boots. The burned line had been laid over older ones, the scorch layered, generations of assessments in one black ring. Chalk marks ghosted under fresh chalk at the panel end. The yard had been doing this longer than the families watching it.

A stone yard, open to the grey, just as Marsh had said. The way the report would have called outdoor if the report came this far.

At the yard’s edge, past the burned line, a single tree stood in a stone collar. Old. The only living thing inside the wall that the wall had not put there. Kept for a reason a lamplighter did not get told.

There’s the box. There’s the door. There’s the panel that sees beasts and not handlers. And somewhere in three tiers of people it spent a week mapping, is whatever drew them here. Watching the one part of all of this it actually came for. Which is not me, and not the panel.

Miasma’s weight came forward on his shoulder.

She went slow and careful, then lower, down to the place she had gone on the cobbles of his own dead corner, the night she finished knowing what rode his other shoulder.

She did it facing in. Into the yard. At the tiers, the panel, the tree, the burned line. At something across the open stone he could not read.

She had gone down there three times. The relic. The cut. The empty corner the night she put herself between Nyx and the dark.

She was doing it now, at the yard, before he had taken a step into it.

Nyx shifted on his shoulder.

It did not go down. It did not cross stone. It rode forward to the front of his shoulder. Small and dark. It put the pale eyes up off him, off the man it had spent a week watching breathe, and out across the yard. Level, fixed, total. The way they had only ever gone at the dark behind a grate and the empty corner of an empty lane.

Both of them aimed at the same thing across the open stone. Neither of them at the panel. Neither of them at Percival. Neither of them at him.

They did this in the cut. They did this on the corner. They only do it at one thing. It’s here. It’s already in the yard, in the room it built. They found it before I crossed the line. The panel is going to call my name to walk out onto that stone in front of the thing they’re both looking at, on a lung that’s still being taken apart. There is no other door.

The proctor’s voice came from behind him, off the list, flat, and carrying just to the cold of the doorway.

"Vell. You’re called second."